


Splendid's Moon

by hellkitty



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-07-02
Packaged: 2018-04-07 06:25:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4252821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So, yeah, kink meme prompt about Ace's birthday.  </p><p>I figure they probably lost the Gregorian calendar along with, you know, the rest of civilization, so Joe makes up his own. Isn't that sweet of him?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Splendid's Moon

She’d check with Ace, Furiosa thought, as she stepped into her crew’s repair bay. He liked being kept in the loop on these things, and she liked having a second, someone she knew on her side.

Furiosa stopped, hearing voices. Hearing young voices. And then Ace’s rough voice, responding.

She slipped behind one of the pursuit vehicle’s tires, folding herself into the shadow, listening, just peeking enough around it to see Ace, scrubbing at a dismantled engine, three War Pups gathered around.

“Imperator Cable said you were old,” one of the pups said.

“Yeah, well, I’ve got a few words I’d use to describe Imperator Cable, too,” Ace said, evenly, but from here, Furiosa could see the pull of his mouth. She decided she had a few to add herself to that list. 

“He said you’re so old you even have a…a…,” the pup looked at his friend, for help.

“A burfday!” the other pup supplied, proudly, before his face fell a little. “Only, he didn’t say what that was.”

“Birthday,” Ace corrected. “And everyone’s got one. It's when you were born.  Just that we used to actually remember ours.” He shrugged.

“But isn’t Midpoint more important?” asked a pup. “It’s when—“

“I know what it is,” Ace said, cutting the pup off, like he didn't want to hear pups talk about death. “And you should remember when your friends finish their half life. It’s how you honor them.”

“So why remember your birthday?”

“Because,” Ace looked up, squinting into the shadows gathered around the ceiling. “Because it was for other people, too, I think. People happy to have you in their life.”

The pups sat silently with it, chewing on the idea that seemed so foreign to them. 

“I want a birthday,” one of the pups said, forlornly, scuffing a bare foot against the chipped stone of the floor.

Ace stopped scrubbing at the piston. “So have one. Pick a day.”

“When’s yours?”

His mouth flattened again, and he said, fast enough that Furiosa knew this wasn’t something he had to think about, “Twenty-sixth of the Splendid’s Moon.”

“That’s in two days!” one of the pups said.

“You can borrow it if you want,” Ace said. “Not like I use it for much.”

“How do we do it?”

“However you want. When I was a ki—pup—“ the correction was fast, almost a hiccup, “you got together and played games. Had cake, stuff like that.”

“Cake?”

“It’s…yeah, they don’t have it anymore. Anywhere, I think.” He coughed, as though trying to break free of some spell. “Wasn’t that good anyway. Just a kind of food. But the important thing was that you shared it with your friends.”

The pups nodded solemnly, eyes wide, and two of them linked hands, like a promise.

“Now, get on out of here. I got work to do,” Ace said, holding up the piston. "And better things to talk about than ancient history." 

The pups scattered, and Furiosa found herself sitting behind the tire. She’d forgotten what she’d come here to ask, and all she could think about was the way Ace’s voice got rough when he talked about it.  

Two days, she thought. Two days.

***

“You wanted to see me.” Ace popped up crisply, right on time, as the last rays of a red sunset sprawled over the Citadel.

“I thought we could go for a little recon,” Furiosa said, tapping the hood of the car. “Just get out for a little bit.”

His mouth pulled, unhappy. Like he had other plans for the night.

“Something wrong?”

He shook his head, shoulders dipping. “Nah. Just tired or something.”

Or something, she thought. Right. “Get in.”

He dropped into the passenger seat, taking up the crossbow and resting it on his lap. On duty, obviously, looking out for trouble. She rolled out, taking one of the smaller passageways out of the Citadel, nodding at the gatekeeper. And then there was the desert in front of them, aflame with sunset, rich reds and ochres, the growing shadows long pools of violet.

She drove for half an hour, enough that there was nothing around them, only desert, rising and falling in dunes like a sleeping dragon’s breath, before slowing the vehicle to a stop. Ace’s gaze snapped over to her. “See something?”

She said nothing, reaching behind her and pulling out a satchel, before stepping out of the car.

Ace followed her lead, boots hitting the packed sand, squinting around them. His entire body was taut, tense, straining eyes and ears at the darkness that had blossomed around them.

The engine ticked over, cooling in the night air, and Furiosa threw a fire blanket over the hood, climbing up on it, and gesturing to the empty space next to her.

“What?”

She dug in the satchel, pulling out a bottle of Joe’s moonshine. “Need some help emptying this,” she said.

He tilted his head, but clambered up beside her, waiting for her to take the first drink before reaching for the bottle. “’M I going to find out what this is about?”

“Maybe. Later.” The moonshine burned in her belly like quicksilver, like something to match the glimmering stars. She settled back, resting her back along the windscreen, looking up at the sky. “Pretty out here, isn’t it?”

“I guess,” Ace said. “Empty, though.”

“Empty,” she echoed, reaching for the bottle, so she could have the excuse of drinking to talk less.

“You know. Nothing growing out here. No animals. No towns. Nothing.”

“You remember towns?” The Vuvalini still had a few, trading centers, markets. Her heart ached, and the burn of moonshine did nothing to soothe it.  Visiting the towns was a special occasion--your best clothes, your hair braided and beaded.  Not like Gas Town, where you went in pairs, openly armed. 

“Yeah, I remember towns.” He sounded a little bitter at first. “Remember ‘em crumbling, mostly. Burned out buildings. Signs of stuff that used to be…well, stuff we don’t even have anymore.” He sighed, and she handed the bottle back over, because his heart needed soothing, too. “Maybe it’d be better if I forgot, though.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, quietly. She didn’t want to forget her people, she knew that. Sometimes the memories of the Vuvalini were all that held her from screaming into madness.

“Too old, I am,” he said, staring moodily upward. “Only th’Immortan himself’s older’n me.”

“That’s not too old,” Furiosa countered. “Nobody says that about Joe—that he’s too old.”

“That’s different. He's different,” Ace said, but his voice seemed unsure as to how. “Sometimes, you know, the Boys…they think I’m a failure. ‘Cause I haven’t made it to Valhalla yet.”

“I’m glad you haven’t,” she said, and she knew it was the moonshine loosening her tongue. But it’s nothing she didn’t feel. She just normally wouldn’t have said it. And she felt his eyes on her, like darts.

“I’m no coward,” he said, and his voice was quiet, as if he was confessing a deep fear—that he thought maybe he might be. That maybe he was a failure, that he'd outlived his chance at glory, letting it pass him by somehow. 

“You’re not, Ace. Remember what you told me when I first was exalted to Imperator?” Because she remembered it, every day, every fight.

He snorted. “Think I tried to tell you about a thousand different things.”

More like ten thousand. “Some of it even stuck,” she said, risking a grin, and she saw an echo of it on his own lips. “But you know. The part where dying’s easy. Anyone can die—“

“—the trick is to make it worth something,” he finished. It was like a bond between them, words passed between them like the bottle.

Silence settled over them, turning moody. The moon had risen, glowing down at them, white and inscrutable, pure and scarred at the same time, and Furiosa sat up, after a moment too long of it, and unbuckled the straps, letting her left arm’s prosthesis fall into the sand with a soft schuss. She circled the shoulder, free of the weight of it, with a contented sound.

“So,” she said, settling back down, looking up at the swollen moon. “Twenty-sixth of the Splendid’s Moon.”

“Yeah.” His voice was wary, suspicious.

She tipped her head back against the car’s roof. “I don’t remember my own birthday. I mean, the conversion to the Citadel’s calendar.” The Vuvalini didn’t mark their years by naming each moon after one of Joe’s Wives, for one thing. “I just know it was after the days started turning longer again, but it was still cold.” Maybe not a subtle segue, but she was doing the best she could.

“…that was this is about?” She could almost feel the tenseness rise in him.  

“Is that a problem, Ace?” she rolled her head along the roof, lazily.

“No,” he said, a little fast. “No. Just…it’s just a day. Like any other. Nothing important.”

“Nothing,” she said, in a mild challenge. "Not at all."  That was why he remembered it so easily, that was why he'd hesitated earlier. 

He had no answer, lapsing into silence for a moment, and taking a swallow from the bottle that must have burned all the way down to his belly. “…didn’t have to do this,” he said, voice hoarse from the moonshine.

“I know.” But she’d wanted to. There was so little to celebrate, and the way he’d explained it to the pups had cracked something in her heart. She reached back to the satchel, holding it out. “It’s not cake, though.”

His mouth was a tight line, like he was trying to mash it together around some emotion, as he dug into the bag, and pulled out an apple. One of the rare treats of the orchards, normally off-limits to the War Boys. He looked up at her, then down at the apple, as though its weight was pulling him down and then he reached along his leg, pulling out his knife.

“What are you doing?”

He didn’t look up at her, concentrating on slicing the apple in half, blade cutting with that perfect sound of sharp steel through its wet white flesh. “If you overheard me ‘n the pups, you know the whole point is to share it.”

So she was busted, but she couldn’t feel bad about it, and she the half-apple solemnly, waiting for him to take a bite before she took hers. It was sweet, that perfect sweetness with a little taste of tart in it, light and crisp and wonderful. And made even better, somehow, by sharing.  

“Can’t even remember last time I had one,” he said, but it was less a lament than gratitude, for the taste of one again.

“How else did you celebrate? I couldn’t think of any games,” she said. They had training games, of course, but those didn't seem very, well, festive. 

He didn't seem to have any to offer either.  “How ‘bout you? With your people.”

She shook her head. “We’d have a dance. There was music, and the girl would start a dance, and bring all of her friends into it. Singing, too.” She could remember her mother’s birthday, one year, the bright shine of her face in the firelight, hair twirling around her shoulders like a cape.  

“Yeah, well, don’t expect that from me,” he said. “Not really a singin’ type.”

“I bet that’s a lie,” she said.

“I bet you’re never gonna find out,” he retorted, finishing his apple half, seeds and all. Which pretty much answered that, she figured.

“We used to, also,” she said, and the fluttering in her stomach had nothing to do with the moonshine, “on our day, we’d get to kiss someone.”

“Someone.”

“You know, the person who matters most to you.” For years it had been her mother, and she was just at the age when her meaningful kiss might have gone to one of her friends when…

…that was not a thought for tonight. She forced her voice light. “You could always do that, if you wanted.”

“Really."  Ace made a show of looking around.  "Kind of stacked the deck a little in your favor, didn’t you?”

“Maybe,” she said, and the smile that spread on her face was honest and true. “How about this: I’ll close my eyes, and you can have the privacy to kiss the car all you want.”

She heard a garbled sound of protest, and tried to fight the giggle. “Closing my eyes now.”

She did, actually, close her eyes, taking a deep breath. She could feel the engine’s heat seeping through the blanket beneath her, and the cool air, and she could swear she even felt the moonlight against her skin, like a silver too delicate and rare to be chrome.

She felt him near her, leaning closer, as though he was trying to decide, or trying to build his courage. And she knew better than to open her eyes, to break the strange connection that was sweet as apples and harsh as moonshine between them, and then she felt his lips against hers, light at first, almost tentative. Her own mouth curved into a smile under his, and he leaned closer, almost nuzzling against her, until she opened her mouth under his. His hand circled under her neck, and  his fingers slid over the raised brand, and then beyond, pulling her against him. The cool of the night was replaced with the heat of his body; his shoulders over hers, one thigh hooking over her upraised knee.

It lasted a long time, and not long enough, and Furiosa felt almost surprised to look up and see the moon, beside his shoulder, hadn’t moved an inch. It felt like something had shifted, not between them as much as with the world, as though this had somehow snagged something deeper, in both of them, than she’d intended.

But she couldn’t feel regret, not with the way the moonlight caught his eyes, limned the skin of his shoulder, so that the lumpy flesh just seemed like an echo of the grey mottled moon, and she pulled him back against her with her good hand, shifting her body under his, craving contact, feeling the bare skin of his chest and belly against hers.

“Not nice to tease old men.” His voice was husky, raw with something more potent than lust, that life that still welled in him, under the scarred skin and tumor-twisted throat, his hand skimming down her shoulder, like touching a treasure. 

“Who said I was teasing?” Because she wanted nothing more, right now, than to feel him against her, matching their bodies and hearts together. And the night became the two of them in the barren landscape, moving together to a rhythm deeper than tides, two flames of loss and regret and longing, burning bright under the witnessing moon. 

 


End file.
